Friday, December 30, 2011

Adolf Hitler was fascinated with the idea of “The Law of the
Jungle” where only the strongest survive, and they preyed on the weak. This
belief held all the way down to the end, with Germany in ruins, and Hitler
stating that the Germans had brought this all on themselves by putting him in
power. Hitler surmised that if Germany
did not win the war then they deserved total annihilation, and this is what his
beliefs led to for one nation and for about sixty million people worldwide when
the war ground to a halt. Hitler’s thousand year Reich last less than a decade.
The same people he had labeled as subhuman would occupy his former
capital. Those who had most fervently
followed him to ruin also followed him to death via suicide.

We look back in hindsight with no small amount of
revulsion at this man and his followers as symbols of the ultimate in evil. It
isn’t hard to do. In fact, it is quite easy to make a case for Hitler and
Nazism to be held up as an example of a time in history where one man’s idea
grew to a terrible and incredible wickedness. The argument against Hitler being
the ultimate in all things created evil is usually made by those who still see
salvation in the twisted cross of the swastika. History will be unkind to them
as well, for they seem to be little more than disenchanted societal dropouts
looking for a scapegoat for, or a Hero to, their inabilities. In Hitler they find shock value, and
rightfully so, but I suspect that is all they will find, and I suspect it is
all they truly have.

Yet here we are, seventy years later, and even though we
give great lip service to how Nazism could not rise again, certainly not here
in America, and certainly not in this modern day and age, the evidence of some
of Hitler’s teachings are not spoke aloud or preached, but they are instead
practiced silently. Hitler’s beliefs are
not institutionalized not by the government but are instead dictated to us by
economics and poverty. We will not condemn the Jews to ghettos because of their
religion but we will condemn children to live in ghettos because their parents
are poor.

While no one is being taken by rail to the showers the
end results is there are people who are being killed simply because of who and
what they are. The volume of death is not the same but this lessens the evil by
degree, not actuality.

Think about it like this; the German people were told
that a group of people called “Jews” were such terrible people they deserved to
be treated as if they were less than human. Laws were enacted to ensure they
were a criminal class of people, and they could not under any circumstance rise
above this. Their children were to be Jews, and they were to live only with
Jews, never to mix with those of the pure of blood.

Now think about how you would feel if someone moved in
next door to you and they were instead of Jewish, a prostitute. Now, before you
get all weird on me, I am not equating a religion with prostitution, and for
those of you out there who are insulted by this anyway, allow me to apologize
for insulting the prostitutes. At least their trade is a product of necessity,
but religion is a choice and I assure you, there are more reformed prostitutes
than religious zealots. But back to the street walker who lives next door to
you now. Maybe you rather call her a “Hooker”
which is a term used to describe those women who followed General Hooker’s camp
in the War Of Northern Aggression. You will not, in point of fact, find a reference
that describes the men who kept them in business from that point in history, or
for that matter, many others. The men who have kept flesh sellers on their
backs for centuries have mostly gone unnoticed, even though they are responsible
for half of the equation and all of the money.

Ah, but suddenly, if you’re living next door to this
woman of the evening, the men who come for service might not be the type you
want standing around your front yard smoking cigarettes. Yet, generally
speaking, men who get busted for using whores are not nearly as prosecuted, or persecuted,
as those women on the receiving end of their desires, no pun intended.

So Hitler, truly and terribly demented, and homicidal,
decided to go after the Jews, as well as any other group of people considered
to be an underclass, and the people of Germany jumped on the bandwagon, and
you, yes, you who are all shocked and shaken by the presence of the doxie next
door, you would not dream of putting up with something like that, would you?

Strip away the labels we put on people are just toss them
together as a function of consequence and what have you? Your top serial
killers and Adolf Hitler have something in common; both classes of lunatic went
after victims they knew, truly knew, were the most defenseless socially. Both
classes of lunatic used not just murder, but savage, soulless, and brutal
murder to mark their prey as less than human. Both could not be sated but continued
to kill even as murder became what undid them.

Look at how many terms for these women I was able to
recall from memory while writing this. Look at how many of those terms didn’t
really shock you, or outrage you, or cause you to blink an eye. How do you feel
about these women? How concerned are you about those killed by some serial
killer on Long Island? Because they are just minor Hitlers, not killing
millions and after all, are only killing whores, it’s not nearly as bad as
going after a religion, is it?

The Okefenokee is a place of splendid solitude, I told her,
and it is a place you can stop speaking, breathe, and hear nothing but the
sound of the trees living, and the wind and the birds, and the odd sounds that
The Swamp will give you, but never noise. It is a place where time ceases to
exists, and where cell phones do not work. It is a place where two people might get away
to themselves and speak plainly and openly while walking and no one but the
deer and fish would hear their voices. The Okefenokee, I say to her, is magical
and beautiful, and quiet.

The ride to The Swamp is magnificent, with the
approaching canoe trip seemingly already begun. The road stretches before us
long and straight, and the sun comes up bright and warm, the sky clear and
nothing in the way of a day spent on the water in the woods, with birds calling
and perhaps wildlife standing in the shade of the cypress trees, posing
perfectly for photographs.

When we got to the park the evidence of the fire earlier
in the year was apparent. It was worse, far worse, then the fire of 2007, just
four years ago. The damage to the tree
was more severe than I expected, and as we drive deeper into the park the more
obvious, and horrible, the sight became. As we pulled in there was a small
crowd of people loading canoes, and there were noisy people, speaking loudly
and loading a year’s worth of supplies into each craft, and wandering around
without purpose. We waited for them to get ahead of us, but finally gave up and
got into the water what was left of it. I have never seen the water level so
low in The Swamp. Worse still, and the two words “worse still” will reappear
here again and again, worse still, the banks of the canal leading into The
Swamp had been mauled by the fire, and clear cut, a lonely deer stood in the
ruins as if she were the only witness left alive. The camera died too, the
batteries no longer capable of sustaining life, much like the burned out banks
of the Okefenokee.

No sooner did we reach the wide channel, or what was once
a wide channel, in The Swamp, did we realize the damage was far worse, much
more worse, than I ever feared or imagined. The water level was horribly low,
forcing all the canoeists into a smaller area.
The people ahead of us were loud, and behind us were another group, so
we pulled over to the blasted western bank to allow them to pass. It was a terrible sight. Nearly every tree
was scorched and many, many, many, many trees were now gone. Those that were
left looked like the survivors of Hiroshima, standing in mute shock, to stunned
by the violence to escape the scene of the carnage. The shade of the trees
extending over the water were gone, and even had the trees been there the water
was gone, too. The deep dark red black
water was gone, and replaced by a muddy colored stream that looked more like
something you’d find in a theme park than the greatest natural swamp left in
Georgia.

Those people ahead of us we could hear, but from behind
us came the sound as if someone were dragging a logging chain down a paved road
with tin cans attached to it. Again, we let them pass, and this was a mother
and father, with a teenaged girl in front of the boat with the mother, and a
tiny five year old in the front of the boat with the father. They banged and
clanged with paddles against their canoes if the boats were sonically driven.
We nicknamed them “The Clangers” and waited a while to let them pass. Far, down
the river they went, like a sound driven disaster, mirroring the actual damage
by the fire.

But there were more and more and more people to come. In
a place where I could have counted the people I’ve seen totally in the years on
my fingers and toes, suddenly the holocaustic Swamp was an amusement park full
of inept boaters who could not hear the silence of The Swamp and would not
allow it for others. We got behind a man and a woman speaking a foreign
language that sounded like Russian and they could not control their canoe, and
they zigzagged their way in the narrows, blocking us from passing, and causing
more people to bunch up behind us like lemmings at the edge of a cliff.
Everyone was heading for Billy’s Island, and it was like a traffic jam there,
with canoes and canoeists littering the bank. The dock, usually flush with
water, hung five feet in the air, useless for unloading or extracting a canoe
from the water. We managed to get out boat out of the water, but the Clunkers
came behind us, having taken a side path. The father tried to beach his canoe
with his little girl in front, instead of backing in, and I had to help pull
the thing to shore. The man was close to true stupidity, trying to get a boat
out of the water with the heavy end still in the water, and a five year old
trying to get out alone. Getting him
back into the water was also more fun than it needed to be, and I wonder, truly
wonder, if he really knows what happens to people in the water when the air
temperature is below sixty. Hypothermia
can, and will, kill a child before you can get her dried off, or back to somewhere
they can keep her warm.

Billy’s Island was already populated by the Russian
speaking people, but they were now speaking Spanish. Everyone had arrived at
once and there were more people on Billy’s Island than there had ever lived
here before. The trials were crowded and even though we had a good conversation
with people from Atlanta, who had never seen such a crowd or the water as low,
there was no wildlife to see. The Spanish Russian had made camp in the middle
of the trail and we had to walk around them. A nice little bench in the middle
of the forest might have been a good place for a break but this was rush hour
and there was no semblance of privacy to be had at all.

We lost most of
the crowd on the way back, and we totally lost track of the Clunkers. They were
ahead of us, noisily setting the pace, and suddenly we did not hear them
anymore. But the trip back to the landing revealed more damage, more dead
trees, more burned growth, and no sign that this was some sort of rejuvenation
of nature. We asked the woman at the landing if she had seen the Clunkers and
she seemed uninterested in their fate. The Okefenokee is not what it was and I
am not sure if it will ever be again. I would have rather died than to have
ever seen such a sight as I have seen and I can only hope that somehow, nature
can heal her own.

Monday, December 26, 2011

The road to my father’s house is always long. There isn’t a
way to make it shorter. I once had friends in Thomasville I could drop in and
see but at Christmas their road was much longer than mine. They spent two days on
the road at Christmas, first getting up at dawn to dive to her parent’s house
which was only twenty miles away, but by
lunch they had to go back home and drop off the toys her parent’s had given
their two kids, and then on the road to his parent’s home which was seven hours
away. They would spend the night there and come home the next day and all the
while the kids were yelling and screaming about wanting to go home to begin
with. No one on either side of the issue would give an inch because of that
insane idea of having Christmas at someone’s house is more important than
Christmas itself.

We did that for a couple of years when I was a very small
child and it was worse back then because there were three of us kids and we
lived in a very tight knit little neighborhood. We wanted to get out and
explore Christmas gifts with the other kids, but we were boxed up and taken to
our grandmother’s house two hours away and wouldn’t get back until dark. That
only lasted a few years and then everyone started coming to our house Christmas
morning and that lasted until the divorce then we started having two of everything
there for a while. The two Christmas and Thanksgiving ordeal still goes on to
this day, except we finally have just one Thanksgiving at my sister’s house
now.

The road back is long. The place where I spent the worst
part of two decades of my life is packed with ghosts and dead memories, long past
attempts at growing up and drunken swipes at good times. Most of the dirt roads
are gone now, and we never saw that coming, like most things, but no one ever
realized roads themselves where transmutable. Once was, at sixteen, you could
park a car in the middle of the road in the middle of the night and stand there
and take a leak, drink a beer, roll a joint, make out with a young girl, and traffic
didn’t exist. You could pull off into any field and there was nothing but
darkness and stars and hope. Rarely was there any sort of interruption and that
was not nearly as rare as meaning, but we weren’t sure what that meant any more
than we were cognizant of the world around us that might change.

On the outskirts of Blakely there’s a small motel and I
think it was there before the town, actually. I spent forty dollars, back in
the early eighties, for two night there, for a long date with a woman I loved,
and lost, and had regained just for a while longer. I was going into the Army,
she was a single mom all of a sudden, and it seemed like what we had lost in the
High School we might have again. There was alcohol and pot, and a lot of sex in
two nights but there wasn’t anything else. To me, what else was there to have? I
was twenty-two, and broke, with no car, no prospects, no outlook past what was
in the last bottle, no future past the next erection, no sense of obligation
except to keep the illicit drug industry alive, but I did love her wildly. She
had left her daughter with her parents and she missed the child and I did not
understand that, could not understand that, and when a friend picked us up to
take us home after those two days we went down that same road that I had to
travel to get to Christmas, and I remember it still.

The road has been changed, though, and now it’s a four
lane where there was once only two, and there’s a by-pass and the woman who was
still a girl with a daughter is now a grandmother because that daughter has a
daughter. In the blink of an eye everything changed and now all that is left
that was the same is the motel at the edge of the town I cannot stand but have
to come back to anyway. There is the house where the first young person I knew
died of cancer. There is the house where the first person I knew whose father
died when we were still in High School. There is the house where someone I knew
was killed along with his brother in a car wreck. There is a spot where there
was a restaurant, now long gone, just a bare patch of land. There is the old
pizza place, long since turned into other restaurants, but that is where I fell
in love with pinball. There was a liquor store there where I bought cheap booze
when I was sixteen. I know where each and every side road leads and each and
very side road leads nowhere, just as they always have, and just as they always
will, until they in turn, are changed or destroyed.

I feel like a ghost, recalled from the dead, to haunt
where I once lived, in the name of the past. I pull over in the parking lot of
where there was once a place that made good pizza, and where I learned to play
pinball, and I wonder about what happened to the man who ran the place, and
made the food, whose name I never knew.I made a drug deal in this very spot in 1978 and bought a pound of pot,
and that was going to be my ticket to big time drug dealing, and I wonder if
the man who ran the pizza place had dreams as big as mine. I am likely older
right now than he was when he made pizza, and I always thought he was ancient.

The road back leads past all these places, but now I am
surfacing, driving upwards and outwards and into the future, not the past. Christmas
is over and the town where I am but a ghost recedes from my rearview mirror and
resides only in the form in which you see it, for yet another year.

Henry Miller said "Develop an interest in life as you see
it; the people, things, literature, music — the world is so rich, simply
throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget
yourself."

Take a single man playing a kid's game and give him a few million dollars a year, and he still can't raise a kid while he's doing it. Give a mom a glove and she can not only catch a ball, but give her kid something to talk about forever, once he's old enough.

Sunday, December 25, 2011

The Novelist Oren Arnoldhad the following Christmas gift suggestions: "To your enemy, forgiveness.
To an opponent, tolerance. To a friend, your heart. To a customer, service. To
all, charity. To every child, a good example. To yourself, respect."

Saturday, December 24, 2011

Suppose you had a friend. Let’s give this friend a name,
your friend ‘Bob” and Bob is someone you met when you were a little kid, so
little, you really don’t remember meeting Bob because you two were infants
playing together when you lived next door. Your parents and Bob’s parents have
always been friends, too. In fact, you went through school with Bob, each
grade, and nearly every class. Over the years you two have defining moments
that really couldn’t possibly mean anything to anyone else. You remember the
day Bob kit a golf ball with a baseball bat and the thing hooked wicked and
hard, arcing towards Mrs. Redfern’s plate glass window was if it were one of
those smart bombs, and as it streaked towards the window you both stood there
in horror because right there behind the window was Mrs. Redfern reading her
paper, doing her crossword puzzle with her cat in her lap and there’s the
little white ball going to… and at the very last moment, a squirrel jumped from
the roof of her house down to the ground to eat some of the birdseed spilt
there, and that damn squirrel gets nailed by the golf ball, dead center, and
deflects the ball harmlessly away. Mrs. Redfern looks up, having caught the
action out of the corner of her eye, but she can’t see anything. Bob and yourself
fall over dead laughing, cheering, the relief so strong it’s nearly
sexual.Later the two of you retrieve
the dead squirrel and bury it with the golf ball. You keep thinking one day the
two of you will dig it up again but oddly, neither of you ever bring it up
again.

But you
and Bob go on to High School together, and play baseball for the team, you in
left field, and Bob playing center. Your team is good, but loses the
championship in your senior year 15-2, but you and Bob score those two points,
and somehow, you both feel like you took away more from the defeat than your
opponents did in victory. College is a blur of good times and all night study
sessions and suddenly you and Bob are looking at getting real job in the real
world.Bob winds up with Diane Holton, and you knew
those two would make a break pair, even when you were dating her. Had to break
her in for you, is how you joke about it with Bob, and with anyone else that
might start a fight but not with Bob. You get married to Diane’s first cousin,
Lisa, and people talk because the two look so much alike, but you don’t care
and neither does Bob.

There’s no way the two of you find a job together and
that’s okay because you live on the other side of town and that’s not too far.
Things are different, but everyone knew it would be one day, and Diane gets
pregnant first. You and Lisa try as hard
as two people can and you lie awake at night wondering if it’s you or if it
might be her, or maybe both, but they have doctors that can help. Then one night,
very late, Bob shows up and he’s clearly upset and he wants to talk to you, in
the car and he turns up the music way too damn loud and has to shout in your
ear for you to hear him. You think you hear the word “aliens” and you think
this might be an immigration issue of some sort then Bob starts to write thing
s down. Bob thinks there are aliens in the woods behind his house and he thinks
they want to steal the baby.

Here’s the thing in all this; everyone goes to the movies
because they want to see something spectacular and unreal, but when it gets
right down to it, no one wants anything like that in their own life, or in the
lives of the people they know. You try to talk Bob down from this and you’re
surprised he’s so adamant about you not saying anything out loud about it. He
gets physical and loud when you say the word aloud and clearly he’s very upset.
He makes you promise not to mention this to Lisa or Diane, but you know you’re
going to have to explain why Bob woke you both up at two in the morning. And
you don’t have to wait very long, either. Diane and Lisa are already talking
and when the two of you get back Lisa is standing in the yard talking.

Of course you feel like it is a form of betrayal when the
three of you get together to talk about him behind his back. These two women
have no idea who they are talking about or what they are talking about but you
have to admit to them, and to yourself that Bob has slipped a cog, that something
is wrong, and this isn’t something that spending a few hours butchering wood in
the shop over a few beers will solve. Bob has quit his job and he spend all his
time hiding in the woods and stocking up for the invasion.

So finally you go with Bob into the woods and he tells
you there’s a mother ship and the aliens are pouring out of it like ants.
Halfway there you realize he’s packing a gun and now you realize the women were
right and something has to be done. The mother ship, of course, isn’t there and
Bob laments that they moved, knowing he was bringing someone to prove they
existed, and he is sure he can find them again. You ask Bob if he remembers the
squirrel and you think it’s time to dig it up again.

The day you drive Bob to the hospital he’s holding an
ancient golf ball still pocked with dirt, You and Bob dug a hole the size of a
grave trying to find it, but there it was, still in what was left of the old
tin lunch box, but there were only tiny bone fragments of the squirrel. You
hope the meds keep Bob quiet until they get him processed in but he loses it
and goes in screaming. The drive home is silent, lonely, and tense. As you pull
into the driveway you notice lights are dropping from the sky.

Friday, December 23, 2011

If there is ever some weird Mayan Apocalypse the people of
America are going to be ready. Every
weekend since Thanksgiving we have practiced for it. And now, in the last week,
preparations for the end of the world have been in full swing. America is ready for anything and everything.
The Four Horsemen might as well be selling rides for a quarter at a petting zoo
in Cleveland. That nation stand ready for a full nuclear war, locusts, a two
hour dancing with reality stars on an island television special and Ebola on
pop tarts. Ladies and Gentlemen, the
weekend before Christmas is upon us and next to that there is nothing more stressful
or frightening known to mankind since the two words “President Quayle” were
first spoken.

Anywhere anyone is selling anything is packed with people
who want to buy something. People like me, who ordered online, had it shipped
at the last moment, and now are frantically realizing not even Fed-ex is going
to throw us a package over the fence, are freaking out. Well, I’m not freaking
out because I went out for some food and just came back home instead. I’ll be damned if I’m going into a building
with that many people in it unless there’s a football game going on, or at
least some beer. A homeless man set up a booth on an overturned shopping cart
and put out a sign that read, “Half off” and it’s standing room only under that
cart. Plumbing supply outlets now have people wandering around looking for that
perfect gift. I swear I passed a junkyard that had some people browsing.

You could sell radioactive altars suitable for Satan
Worship and you’d get a hundred people walk in and, one, see if it was cheaper
on Amazon and two, ask you if you gift wrapped.

If you sold gift cards where the money went to driving
the whales into extinction and hauling the dead carcasses to Elementary School
as playground equipment you would sell out before anyone really asked you if
this included porpoises, too.

If you put up a nativity scene in the shower room of a maximum
security prison for the sexually disturbed, the criminally insane, and the sexually
hyper, people would stop and take pictures of it to put on Christmas cards.

I swear to dog this year seems to be the worst ever.

The one local store we have has cars parked directly in
front of the store where there are no parking spaces. People are so driven, so
bent on shopping, all other considerations are now gone. The time it would take
to walk across a parking lot has become a hindrance to survival. I cannot
imagine what it looks like inside that building right now. Christmas is still
two days away so no one has to start cooking right now but just the act of
buying food has become a quest. It’s a mission. It’s a pilgrimage. For some
people getting everything done right damn now has become an issue so personal
it’s like they’re having sex with their credit cards. They’re putting more
effort into buying stuff than I would getting Angelina Jolie to undress in
front of me. After a while, after some point, isn’t there a time when you just
have to admit it isn’t really worth it? I’m talking about shopping still, try
to focus.

There were people trampled to death on Black Friday.A woman piked a crowd of shoppers that same
day. Bodies were left pushed to the side so people could spend money on gifts. People
were robbed at gunpoint. People died in car crashes. People put money on credit
cards they know damn well they will not be able to repay. All in the name of
getting something to put under the tree some people will break their personal
budgets and their families will suffer for it. I can only wonder how many dogs
are dumped out or taken to the pound after Christmas, living sacrifices for
that perfect gift.

You have to wonder how much money is spent on nothing at
all. All that pretty gift wrapping paper, and the packaging it came with, well,
it’s all headed for the landfill. All the boxes all that stuff came in, yes, it
too is headed for the landfill. The dead Christmas trees have to be disposed of
and you see many alongside the city streets with tinsel still covering their now
dead branches.Miles and miles of
packing tape,tons of broken ornaments,
and that cheap plastic throw away junk Wal-Mart sells as yard decorations are
all headed into the earth where it will not decompose but it might wind up in
your drinking water one day.

In two days’ time I will once again get into my truck and
drive two hours to my father’s house where my sister and I will spend part of a
morning and an afternoon. We’ll leave and I’ll drive two hours back home, and Christmas
will be over for another eleven months or so. Hopefully, I wouldn’t get killed
on the way home, and hopefully, everyone there last year and this year will be
there next year. But I also hope that one day the madness will end and Christmas
will one day mean something more than a nation’s moth-like attraction to conspicuous
spending.

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About Me

The Non Disclaimer

My writing reflects the things I see, think, and experience, and those things in my past that have led me to be me. It is not always pretty, it is not always funny, and no one has ever made mention of my life as a Disney Movie. If sex, drugs, profanity, or a general irreverence for all things religious somehow offends you, well, there are other blogs which will satisfy your need for self assurance.